Unforgiven
by Cinis
Summary: Not all who wander are lost. But some are. [oneshot]


A/N: Thank you deeply to my beta reader Balabalabagan who has been with me on this fic pretty much every step of the way. Also to Deixis, my eternal writing buddy. And to ShadowBlazer, though I haven't spoken with you in a while.

This fic is a companion fic to my other story, Wander. It was written using the same restrictions.

1. Avoidance of proper nouns  
>2. Super heavy reliance on lore and quotes from the game<p>

A list of characters is included at the bottom.  
>Almost all spoken lines have been taken from the game.<p>

You can read this story without having read Wander, though the Riven section will make more sense if you've read the other story.

* * *

><p>Not all who wander are lost.<p>

But some are.

The tears are hot on the man's face and they flow down in a torrent.

His back is bent and he kneels in soft grass of the field by the cliff while he cradles his dying brother in his arms. Beneath him, the dirt turns to mud where it drinks up blood.

The brother reaches a crimson-drenched hand up and touches the man's cheek. "Who else?"

The man has no answer so instead he screams – screams at his brother, screams at the circumstances, screams at the stars and the moon and the heavens, screams until his throat is raw and filled with the coppery taste of blood - so much blood, so much blood covering everything, him, his brother, their land.

All through the night he scratches his hands against the ground until he's dug a shallow grave. In that grave, he lays his brother and he covers the corpse with earth and sticks and whatever rocks he can find. When he's done, he stabs his brother's sword down at the head of the low cairn, lest any pass by ignorant.

The sun rises, and the man walks away with the wind at his back.

(unforgiven)

The man walks in a straight line through the endless sea of emerald bamboo.

He searches.

The land has eyes, he knows, and the eyes fall on him in due time.

The Heart of the Tempest arrives first, as is his nature. He comes rushing through the forest of grass, shuriken flying, bending bamboo with the force of his passing.

The man sets a hand on the hilt of his sword and when the time is right he draws his blade and in a single stroke blows away the storm of steel.

The Heart of the Tempest slows his pace and circles the man. With a flick of the wrist, the diminutive warrior draws another handful of shuriken and flings them with unerring accuracy.

The man scoffs. He spins with his sword and dodges and deflects and dances through the assault. Even before the last shuriken has fallen, he pushes off from the ground and in a gust of wind launches himself toward his enemy.

Skillfully, the Heart of the Tempest avoids the attack. He dives and rolls and springs to his feet some distance away.

The man scoffs. "Scurry back to your shadows, ninja."

The Heart shakes his head. "Your death," he says. "For Ionia."

Watching the movements of his opponent, the man adjusts his grip on his sword. He is ready. "Death? It's like the wind – always by my side."

The man blinks.

The Heart is in front of him, leaping forward, about to drive a shuriken through his throat. "I am the wind."

A heartbeat slower and the man would be dead. Instead, he pulls himself away and the Heart's blade slices a long and shallow crimson line across his neck.

The time for banter is over. There is no room for error.

The man swings wide with his long sword and misses – but that was the idea. Seeing the Heart dash forward through the opening, the man twists and pulls his weapon back, catching his enemy hard in the jaw.

The small warrior hits the ground.

The man takes his sword and runs Heart through.

Blood sprays up and splatters all across the man's face and covers his clothes and the ground and the body of his foe.

He pulls the sword free, walks some distance away, and wipes it clean.

Guilt settles in his gut. It's not a new feeling.

Maybe the wound is fatal. Maybe it isn't.

He didn't have a choice.

(unforgiven)

The Fist of Shadow finds him in a crowded tavern in a small village.

Her first strike has lethal intent.

A whispering of wind is all the warning he needs - all the warning he gets - to throw himself out of his chair. A kama smashes through the air where he was and bites deep into the wooden table. His drink spills across the floorboards.

Heedless of the screaming crowd, the Fist of Shadow yanks her weapon out and advances on the man.

In such a confined space, he can't swing his long sword without harming a bystander.

She's smaller than him though, and her weapons are short, made for close-quarters combat.

The man can't do anything more than defend himself from an endless flurry of blows.

He dodges as much as he can, but time and time again he is forced to block her strikes with his sword. Every time steel slides across steel the force of the blow weakens his grip.

Still, he keeps moving, keeps his grip on his blade, keeps his head on his shoulders.

He manages to bring the fight toward the doors, but the doors are barred. He spits a curse under his breath. If he pauses to unbar the exit, he'll die.

He holds his ground.

If he is tired beneath her onslaught, she must be exhausted.

Just when the man thinks he can hold his sword up no longer, the Fist of the Shadow relents. She backs away and wipes sweat from her brow.

It's all the reprieve he's going to get, so he forces his body forward in an attack. It's clumsy – he knows it's clumsy – but it's enough to put her on the defensive.

The Fist of Shadow dives to the side. When her shoulder touches the floor, a great bloom of smoke fills the room.

The man coughs and tries to wave the grey smoke away from his watering eyes. There's no wind in the tavern to disperse the cloud.

A breeze whispers through the air and he spins to the side as a blade hurtles past him. It hits something soft and a woman screams a high pitched wail of surprise and pain and sudden endings.

When the smoke clears, the Fist of the Shadow has retrieved her kama. It's covered in blood now.

The man glances at the nearby corpse and then he turns his gaze back to the Fist of the Shadow.

"A necessary sacrifice," she says, low and soft and unfeeling.

Anger, and with it, strength, flash through the man.

He charges.

The Fist of the Shadow steps lightly aside, steps behind an innocent.

The man pulls up short and overbalances, stumbling off, rather than cut the man down.

In a flash the Fist has cut a deep gash diagonally across the man's chest. Steel drags over bone. "Hesitation is the seed of defeat," she mutters into his ear as she passes him.

The man roars in pain and fury. With one hand he clutches at his wound. Blood is pouring out, hot and thick. His vision blurs.

She's talking, saying something, some taunt he can hardly hear over the sound of his own heartbeat.

No one is promised tomorrow. If he dies, if he dies here, now, his elder, his brother – their spirits will roam unavenged.

He turns and charges again.

The Fist of the Shadow again steps behind a living shield.

Hesitation is the seed of defeat.

He does not hesitate.

In the aftermath of the battle, the man limps out of the inn, crawls out of the town, drags himself to a grove some distance from civilization. There he bandages his wound.

When night falls, he lays himself down on the hard ground and suffers a fitful sleep.

In his dreams, the dead are restless.

(unforgiven)

The man searches. He walks the forests and traverses the plains and haunts the alleyways of ruined cities.

He wears a cloak, keeps his head down, shows his face to no one.

He makes his way south, where the land has been made barren by the footfalls of legions and the furious explosions of war.

He listens to whispers on the wind and follows the echoes of war.

They lead him to a valley where a thick layer of ash covers the earth and the bodies of soldiers lie melted, unburied and untouched by carrion eaters. Screams are still frozen on mummified faces.

He walks the length of the valley.

At the far end a great stone juts forth from the ground and at the base of the stone rest rune-etched pieces of a once-great sword.

The man kneels and takes one of the shards in his hands and he feels the wind stir around him.

He rises again. He puts the shard into his bag. He leaves the valley.

As the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months, he often reaches into his bag and runs his calloused hand against the jagged edge of the shard.

In time, his bag becomes caked with dried blood.

The wind guides his feet and his feet take him to an abandoned shrine in a grove in a forest.

The idol that rests there, cradled in its stone alcove, is faceless. Long ago storms erased any identity it once claimed.

The man bows to the ancestor and pays his respects.

Then he sits and he waits.

He does not wait long.

The woman who enters the clearing has hair the color of death and eyes the color of blood.

The wind ebbs and flows around her, diverting from its course to touch the massive sword she carries.

The man has never laid eyes on her before, but he knows her still.

He sets down his gourd and draws his blade. "The story of a sword is inked in blood," he says. "This blade never gets any lighter."

"A sword mirrors its owner," replies the woman.

The man narrows his eyes. His blade never gets any lighter, but it is – and always will be – lighter than hers. He says nothing though. He only adjusts his grip on his sword and drives forward with a diagonal cut, aiming from earth to heaven.

The woman steps aside, avoiding the strike, and answers with a brutal swing that aims to cleave his skull in two.

With great power comes sluggishness. It is a simple matter for the man to not be where the woman's sword is. He counterattacks effortlessly, his body following the forms it learned as a child. Though the woman dashes back, his blade nicks her thigh.

Can the redemption he's sought for so long really be so easy?

No. It's not enough. It's not enough to see her bleed.

"Which weighs more? Your blade, or your past?" he asks.

The woman leaps forward with a wordless roar, just as a wild animal, cornered and wounded, lashes out at the conquering hunter. She brings her sword crashing through the air. Even if the man tries to dodge the blow, her momentum will carry her forward and kill him. He raises his own weapon and catches her blow on the flat of his blade. He holds the hilt in one hand and presses the palm of the other against the cold steel so that his parry does not collapse.

When sword meets sword, the woman's weapon shatters. She's left with naught but a broken piece – a match to the shard that the man has carried for so long.

The man's lips curl into a thin smile. "Broken sword, broken spirit."

"A broken blade is more than enough for the likes of you," the woman spits back.

The man will prove her wrong. He attacks, a storm of strikes, each as quick as the wind and each landing, again and again, shallow wounds, over and over. When he finally slows his onslaught and backs away, she's covered in her own blood and falls to her knees, staring helplessly at her broken sword.

There's a vicious joy in the man's heart as he advances to strike the final blow. "At peace with yourself?" he asks. "You will be."

Maybe she is at peace with herself.

Without warning, the once-dead runes on her black sword flare into life, temporarily blinding both woman and man with their brilliant green light. The light forms an emerald outline of a great sword issuing from the hilt she holds. She looks up and meets the man's eyes.

In that instant, the course of the fight changes.

The man is hard pressed to defend himself.

He had the upper hand, and now he doesn't.

She's found strength, from somewhere, from something.

As he's forced back, his thoughts scatter.

He has searched for so long, suffered so much, lost everything and now he will lose his justice as well.

Without focus, he breaks.

Cut down, he falls like a leaf – a leaf in the wind.

His knees hit the ground and he can't even summon the strength to keep himself upright. He collapses.

For the first time, he tastes defeat, not merely of his body, but of his purpose.

He looks up at the woman. "Make it quick," he begs. "There is only death – mine or yours."

The woman raises her sword, then pauses. "So long I've wandered… so much death." She lowers her blade and the glow of the runes subsides.

The man's hands ball into fists at her refusal. He spits blood and it lands on the bamboo leaves at her feet. "Dying's the easy part," he says to the woman responsible for all the blood on his hands.

In reply, the woman nods.

There's pity in her eyes and it makes him sick to his stomach.

The woman turns.

The woman walks away, leaving her work unfinished.

The man lies in the clearing.

He closes his eyes.

He sleeps, dreamless.

(unforgiven)

When the man opens his eyes, his wounds have been dressed. His gourd has been filled with clear water. His sword has been cleaned and placed in its sheathe and laid by his side.

He sits up and clasps his hands around his weapon. It is heavy, heavier than he remembers.

The swordsman sitting by the ancient shrine stirs from his meditations. The light of a dying sun gleams reflected in the lenses of his elaborate headpiece. "Do not let your pride blind you."

The man sees the stains of blood on the swordsman's hands and he knows who is responsible for the bandages on his body. The man moves to kneel and presses his forehead to the earth, but his words show no such deference. "I will not die dishonored."

The swordsman snorts. "Anger gives motivation without purpose. But… You wish to learn the hard way, I see." He stands. "We shall see which way our paths lead. Until then…" He nods to the man, bows to the shrine, and then leaves the clearing.

When the swordsman has gone, the man gathers up his belongings from where they lie fallen.

He approaches the shrine.

About to bow, he hesitates.

He reaches out and he grasps the stone idol and he pulls it out from where it has rested for so long. Screaming, he hurls it across the grove.

The motion rips open his wounds once more and blood stains white bandages crimson.

The man falls to his knees and weeps.

(unforgiven)

Guided by none but himself, he walks the land. He renews his search. He leaves the north and ventures south. For a time he follows the bends of a river. For a time he travels the hunter's paths through a forest of ancient pines. For a time he hikes the mountains at the center of the continent, always in the shadow of a great fortress in the sky.

Once, meandering through a vast gorge at twilight, he feels eyes upon him. He looks up, scanning the high cliffs. He sees nothing.

Each night in his dreams, the dead demand of him what he cannot not give.

In time, he comes to a place where the land changes.

Instead of forests of high trees, there are forests of low stumps, freshly hewn and weeping sap from white wood. Instead of a plain of green grass, there is a great hole in the ground – like a sick gash ripped into the earth. Smoke rises from the pit as mechanisms work to cut stone from the walls, widening the wound and causing it to fester.

The man continues to walk.

The towns have a different character here. Houses of dark brick and white plaster sit perched over the ruins of dead villages.

The people are different as well.

In the north, men and women ignored the man's passing. Here in the far south they sneer at him. Their skin is pale and their eyes unnaturally large – they bear the faces of the land's demons.

The man forces himself never to flee these places, these people.

He walks through the settlements, down their main roads, and he watches the faces of their unnatural inhabitants. Face by face, they become familiar to him. Face by face, he sees them.

In every village, he asks if they've seen a woman with white hair and a great broken sword.

In every village, the answer is no.

There comes a day when he has walked for so long in a straight line that he comes to the sea.

He wades into the salt water until it pulses around his dirt-encrusted knees. He looks out to the blank horizon and sees nothing – not a bird, not a cloud, not even the sun, for the sun is high above him.

Hours pass.

The water rises to his waist.

The wind pulls at his hair and clothes and howls in his ears but says nothing.

There, where the land becomes water and the water becomes land, the trickster finds him.

Full of laughter, it skips along the surface of the sea and dances around him, sometimes dipping beneath the waves, sometimes flying above them, spinning its trident like a baton.

The man drums his fingers against the hilt of his sword but remains impassive as he watches the trickster's play.

Eventually, the trickster tires of its games and it pauses, supporting itself on its trident, stabbed into the sandy shallows. Its voice is light and youthful and suggests nothing of the depths. "You're boring."

The man blinks.

His weary mind scrambles for a reply, any reply, something to justify his quest, his purpose, himself.

He finds nothing.

The trickster leans forward, trident tipping dangerously so that it is a wonder it doesn't topple down. "Wanna see a trick?" it asks.

The man looks askance at the trickster, but nods.

The trickster's smile is so wide it seems to split its head from one side to the other, revealing rows upon rows of sharp teeth. It laughs. "Lunch time."

The man grips his sword tight, but the trickster is gone in a flash, darting beneath the water's surface and speeding away. It reappears some distance off, leaping from the ocean and diving back in, leaving a spray of shining droplets of salty sea hanging in the air in its wake. Several more times it repeats this motion, going higher every time until finally, finally, it leaps and after it comes another figure, a shark ten, no, twenty times the size of the trickster, desperately chasing a quarry it will never catch.

This time, when the trickster vanishes from sight, it does not reappear.

Neither does the shark.

(unforgiven)

Unable to go any farther the man goes north once more.

The sun sets.

Darkness falls.

The shadow whispers.

It whispers to seek what is hidden. It whispers to seek truth.

The night is moonless and the stars are hidden above thick clouds.

The shadow whispers, "Do not fear the shrouded path," and so the man does not.

He walks and, though there is no light, his feet do not falter nor do they tire.

He walks forward and he walks up.

When the darkness breaks, it is not broken by sun or fire but by the dying glow of ancient runes carved into stone border posts. Runes that once marked the boundary between profane and sacred.

For a moment, the man's step hesitates, but then he presses on.

He comes to a temple, a temple that lies in ruins. He climbs crumbling steps and brushes away twisted vines to venture into the shadows.

The runes struck into the walls are brighter here.

He follows corridors, not knowing where he is going but knowing how to get there.

Only when he reaches the pit does he stop.

The pit is filled with darkness and nothing. It boils and rages and silently screams. Corruption cuts through the blackness of the room and reaches toward the man's heart.

Here is the shadow.

"Find the truth," it says.

The man turns his back and walks away.

The shadow does not follow. It waits.

As he leaves the ancient shrine, the sun rises in the far distance. He has walked all night, but he does not stop to rest now. He must leave. He crosses past the border posts once more and begins the long trek back down the mountain he climbed in darkness.

(unforgiven)

He returns to the southern country where the demons lurk.

He does not ask of them, not anymore. He passes in silence.

He comes upon a town consumed by flames.

All across the outskirts lie corpses, pierced through the back by twisted crimson shafts.

The man sets his hand to the hilt of his sword and advances through the smoke and the stench of burning flesh.

In the center of the town, on a seat of the dead, is the archer. His eyes pulse with a violet light – the same violet light that glows forth from within the black tendrils that wrap him in their embrace and sink down into his skin and then bulge out, thick veins of corruption.

The archer raises his empty bow in greeting. He smiles a sick and despairing smile. "My arrows always find their marks."

The man cannot not bear to look at the disease that encases the archer's heart. Instead, he lets his eyes rest upon the bodies (the bodies of men, the bodies of women, the bodies of children). With a push of his finger he loosens his blade from its sheathe.

The archer scoffs and stands. He gestures to the dead. "The guilty will know agony," he said. "The guilty _must_ know agony." The light in his eyes is fire, burning as bright as the inferno around them.

The man only tightens his grip on his sword.

The archer sets his fingers to his bowstring. An arrow of darkness and rot appears, ready. Still though, he does not draw.

The decision lies with the man.

He takes a deep breath and it is a mistake. All he breathes in is thick, choking, death.

He draws his sword.

The archer is a dancer, nimble above all else, and he easily keeps his distance from the man, raining arrows down upon him.

But the man is a dancer as well and he blows the arrows away with force of his strength. The wind is at his back and it will not allow him to come to harm.

And if it does?

He is a man with nothing to lose.

Flee though the archer tries, the man advances.

It is hardly a fair fight and yet still the archer fights with a desperation born of hate. His arrows of rot grow thicker and wilder and fly from his bow ever faster and some even pierce through the man, ripping into him and out of him again on the other side, but when the man finally closes the distance, it is over.

His sword comes down and slices through the archer's bow and slices through the archer behind it. It bites deep through flesh and bone, cutting from shoulder down to heart.

The archer screams, or perhaps it is a snarl. With one hand he grips the steel sword, holding it in place even as the man attempts to free his weapon and back away.

With his other hand, the archer takes an arrow of twisted corruption and rams it deep into the man's stomach, cutting through skin like paper and stabbing deep, deep into gut.

"The guilty must know agony," the archer whispers.

The man knows agony.

(unforgiven)

Hell is cold.

The man is naked on a plain of ice.

He kneels on the frozen ground with his head bowed as the wind slices razor sharp through unprotected flesh.

The world is a dim grey, lit by a distant pinprick of light far above and far away.

His eyes are open and they stare unblinking at his empty hands, resting between his knees.

For a hundred years, a thousand years, a hundred thousand years he remains motionless.

The world about him does not change.

He does not change.

And then the bird comes.

It passes overhead, casting him into the darkness of its shadow for the briefest of moments.

He looks up.

He sees the great icy phoenix gliding across the twilight sky.

The man stands.

He follows the bird.

He walks for an eternity across the ice.

He walks until he comes to a great mountain, and when he comes to this mountain he climbs.

The rocks are sharp and they cut his skin as he scrambles for purchase scaling the sheer face. He bleeds and the blood freezes to his fingers and hands and arms and all the rest of him as well.

Up above the plain, the wind bites deeper than it ever did below. It howls in his ears, tears at his unbound hair, and threatens to hurl him from his ascent.

He clenches his fingers tighter around the jagged crevices of the slope and continues upwards.

Once, and only once, he looks down.

The dizzying drop yawns beneath him – he has come so far he cannot make out the ground at the foot of the mountain. He looks up once more and for a moment he is paralyzed with fear. Just as he cannot see the ground, he cannot see the summit.

He clings to the rocks, unwilling to move in any direction.

But then the darkness falls on him again as the bird wheels through the sky and briefly blots out that tiny, distant light above.

The man grits his teeth and renews his climb.

If he spent a hundred thousand years on the ice, then he spends a hundred hundred thousand years on the mountain.

But as with the ice, eventually the mountain ends.

Waiting on the peak is the bird. It is silver and dark with black ice as its wings and frozen blue eyes that glow with a spectral light. Around it the air itself seems to warp from the cold.

The man catches but a glimpse of the bird as he pulls himself up onto the lip of the cliff – and then something catches his ankle.

He pulls his leg up, but his leg won't move.

And so he looks down.

In an instant he recognizes the woman who's holding him back. Once, she was a warrior who chased foxes through green woods, laughing, singing. No more. Her eyes are dark and empty. She's still wearing the simple garb of a monk – brown cloth stained black with blood. The clothes she died in.

Another hand wraps around his other ankle.

This one is an older man, not in decline quite yet but no longer at his peak. A long time ago, he gathered the children of the village together to watch him cleave a tree in two with a single swing of his sword.

Then another hand seizes the man, and another, and another, and another and every one of them a man, a woman, a human life he's cut down.

Clinging to the ledge of the mountain peak, the man begins to slip, to slide down, pulled by the weight of a hundred corpses.

He scrambles to keep what ground he's won, but he can't hold himself up against the mass.

He begins to fall.

The dead let go.

He falls.

He collides with the sharp face of the mountain once, twice, three times. Each time the jagged rocks cut him like knives.

After the third time, he is falling through air.

All around him the wind screams.

(unforgiven)

The man opened his eyes and saw dirt and grass.

He reached down and set his palm flat on his abdomen, feeling the raised scar tissue from the wound that should have taken his life.

"I have lent my aid."

The man looked up and saw a vision of the stars before him. Celestial light enveloped her form and wreathed her in a brilliant halo of gold.

As quickly as he could, the man pushed himself up to his knees and bent his forehead to the earth with his hands before him, outstretched in the lowest of bows.

The starchild shook her head. She knelt as well and took his shoulders in her hands and raised him up.

The man did not lift his head to look at her.

The starchild put a finger beneath the man's chin and forced his eyes to meet her own.

Beneath her serene gaze, the man felt like a small child.

"Be at peace," the starchild said. "Live."

She released him and walked away through the grass.

The man stood there, left behind.

Her order echoed in his head.

Live.

Live.

Live.

* * *

><p>The Man: Yasuo<br>The Brother: Yonne  
>The Heart: Kennan<br>The Fist: Akali  
>The Woman: Riven<br>The Swordsman: Master Yi  
>The Trickster: Fizz<br>The Shadow: Zed  
>The Archer: Varus<br>The Bird: Anivia  
>The Starchild: Soraka<p> 


End file.
